This is a different subject, so I thought I should have a separate thread from my other powerpoint qestion (thanks for the help guys, BTW)
I was editing my powerpoint presentation today, trying to make the file size smaller so I could post it for the other students, and no matter what I did, the file size would get bigger.
I could make a picture on a slide smaller, the file would get bigger, I could delete a slide, the file would get bigger, I could do nothing, and just save the file in the same state, the file size would increase. You get the idea.
What could cause this??
I had a .ppt file increase from 16MB to 24MB with almost NO changes, only saving the file.
I have a clerical job, and make a lot of power point presentations. I’ve noticed that too. What I do in those situations is copy/paste everything I need into a fresh document and save that. It tends to be smaller.
Something like this happened to me several years ago, with a huge Quark document. In order to make the file smaller, I reduced the size of some of the images. This resulted in the document becoming larger.
It seems there is a threshold below which the images are embedded within the document. So smaller images are embedded, making the document larger; larger images that are not embedded and need to accompany the document make it smaller.
I don’t know whether this is the case with PowerPoint.
While I can’t really answer the OP question, not having experienced this myself, I can give a tip for making PowerPoint files smaller.
The main thing that makes a PPt file larger are the graphics that are added to the presentation. In many cases these graphics are in a very high resolution format, which means that the graphics themselves are very large.
Graphics that are designed for printing tend to have a very high resolution–often 300 dpi or more. Making the picture smaller does not really reduce the size of the embedded graphics file, since the information is stored as part of the file just in case the user chooses to use a larger version. If the presentation is designed primarily to be viewed on a monitor, you can reduce the resolution of the images to something closer to 100 dpi–it will look fine on most computer monitors, but can make the graphic images themselves significantly smaller.
To reduce the resolution of all images in a slide show, use the following steps.
Open the presentation in normal view, and find an embedded image (any image in the slide show will work).
Double click the image to open the Format Picture dialog box, and make sure that the Picture tab is active.
Click the Compress button on the Picture tab. Make sure that the All pictures in document option is selected, then select the Web/Screen option in the Change Resolution section. Check both the Compress pictures and Delete cropped areas in the Options section.
Click Okay, the Okay. You may get a warning that image quality will be lost, but you can simply agree to that, too. If you truly want to keep the print quality, higher resolution, you can save the file with compressed images (which will be significantly smaller if there are more than a couple of graphics in the presentation) with a different file name.
When “fast saves” is turned on, various Office products will change the way they save data. They’ll basically leave the “previous version” alone, and just add a list of changes to the end. So each save makes the file longer: even a “delete this paragraph” change will make the file larger, rather than smaller.
This doesn’t continue forever, eventually the program will decide to consolidate the changes, but you can’t predict when it will happen.
In the old days (slow hard drives, slow computers), this made saving noticably faster. It still does on very long documents, such as 200+ page Word documents. But most folks can turn it off and get smaller files.
There’s another good reason to turn it off, though, that’s probably more important than the file size. If the file gets corrupted, damaged, truncated, etc, you’re far more likely to be able to recover it if it’s been saved “intact” each time.
As others have noted, even with fast saves off, there’s some detritus that accumulates, which you can get rid of by pasting into a new document. But the irritation and potential clutter of that solution (IMHO) isn’t worth it except with Powerpoint, which tends to be graphics-heavy.
